oh before i forget, i didnt mean that heirlooms caused inflation, i meant heirlooms ruined professions.
for example, you get the heirloom ring, put a wod or whatever ring enchant on it, and now you dont need to re-chant it, posssibly ever, even if you share it between your other chars on that server. it creates an everquest like situation where the gear doesnt bind to one of your specific characters but all your characters…and you never need to replace it as it levels up with you. the only difference being on everquest, you could also sell the gear to other people, as basically only some raid gear became soul bound.
thats not a bad idea if the economy isn’t based on it. but wows economy was based around professions that are really not viable anymore till the beginning of each expac, and near the end, when the high end recipes drop or you have enough faction to buy them and get the mats. the entire game functionality of vanilla, is squeezed into the last ten levels of each new expac, whereas in vanilla, the professions were important from level 1 - 60
Yes, that’s all I’m saying. So when you say that tokens don’t add gold into the economy you are probably thinking of the actual transaction… which is not what I’m referring to.
I think that the more we try to pin down how a specific new feature of the years in Retail caused a sudden downfall, we realize that it was a domino effect of screw ups. For every problem there was a solution that caused 2 more problems. I can’t necessarily blame Blizzard or people asking for changes over the years, most didn’t realize where it would lead. Hell I had no idea, and I’ve asked for a few changes over the years myself, or at least supported other claims.
I believe someone mentioned how it’s actually possible for a WoW Token to generate non-trivial amounts of gold depending on how prices fluctuate but the seller is guaranteed the amount of gold when they put it on the AH. I don’t know the veracity of that claim, but it’s something to consider.
For me, WoW Tokens in Classic have a more readily present negative effect on how people approach farming and gold scarcity. Back then a lot more stuff you needed was on the AH, including a lot of Pre-raid BiS. Even if they don’t generate gold themselves, like Ehma said it will encourage people to farm in Classic differently than they would have otherwise.
I should point out that I think even if Classic had Tokens, people would probably still opt for Retail to farm Blizzard currency. Retail still has Garrisons and Classic will NEVER have that.
From what I gather, it’s that there’d be a new incentive to farm gold that wasn’t there before. People would have more of a reason to generate gold and trade it around to people who want to swipe their credit card for a one-stop shop of everything they’ll ever need gold-wise in Classic including epic mount, pre-raid BiS, enchants, and a helping of consumables with at least half left over.
One thing to think about is Classic is meant to stay static, so new gold sinks can’t be introduced over time. Once you buy your epic mount you really don’t have any major gold sinks outside of constant respecs and maybe consumables if you’re feeling lazy.
So the game would go from “copper pinch while leveling to get your mount” to “sell WoW Tokens to max level super farmers”.
To make things more succinct, the gameplay approach to gold changes completely. Instead of everyone pinching coppers, plying their trades and playing the AH, the economy becomes “people that farm” vs “people that pay RL money”. You get to skip the entirety of the gold making process because someone at max level with a farming strategy is already generating a crap ton of gold.
Though I feel like it needs further explanation. Sure WoW Tokens don’t generate gold on their own (in theory), but it changes how people approach economy and generating gold.
its good that its available to players on retail, anyone who needs the financial help, people that cant afford the sub, for example, because they lost their jobs and havent been able to find a new one. classic players in that predicament, can still go to retail and farm up tokens for sub payments, and even accrue a stockpile so they dont have to worry about the sub for a long time. such people should be busy doing that right now on retail in preparation for classic!
He didn’t PvP, if he did he’d know that farming gold was important.
Consumables and repair bills were as much a thing for PvP as they were for raiding.
I’m loving how everyone is finding excuses for where all the gold came from. Like the game isn’t going on 15 years old, with a lot of people who have played for years, has no regular gold sinks, and allows even the casual player to make gold hand over fist.
Or like WoW wasn’t infested with bots and gold selling services, and still is.
Tokens didn’t add crap to the game. It shifted a lot of gold farming away from the resellers to the players, and it’s a 15 year old game; of course the economy is overinflated.
The problem with tokens, whether they introduce gold directly or indirectly or not, is that they lower the “value” of gold.
Someone willing to plonk $20 for XXXX Gold likely values that actual gold less than someone who spent YYY hours farming that gold. That can lead to inflationary behavior. The tokens also quickly concentrate large amounts of gold, which devalues it even more.
Whether it’s 1K, 5K, 10K gold in vanilla for a token - -it’s a LOT of gold.
At the end of Vanilla, after having bought literally everything purchaseable/craftable for my Warrior, I did NOT get the Lion Hearts helm, because it would have been 1000g for a single point of Crit. And a single point of Crit wasn’t worth 1000g to me. Even though I had several thousand by then, 1000g was a lot of work.
$20 to a token buyer, that 1000g is probably not worth a whole heck of a lot to them. “What the heck, 1,100g for the helm then!”
Simply, the Tokens introduce incentives for not necessarily healthy behaviors in the game.
supply and demand is usually a good equalizer. but artificial injection, such as gold being created out of thin air that wasn’t in the economy 2 seconds before that, that’s gonna muss things up
Wrong. The gold would still get farmed because the token seller still needs that gold, otherwise they wouldn’t have incentive to soend $20 on it. Or do you think people will just decide to not buy mounts or gear off the AH? No, they’ll buy it, it’ll just take longer because they’d have to farm the gold themselves. People aren’t going to drop $1,000 on tokens just so they can sit at the gold cap.
You can please reply my comment refuting Ludwig von Mises the winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Economics? How does changing demand not influence price?
